Five Glimpses of Gennady Rozhdestvensky

In memory of Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1931-2018), who died one month ago today.

1

Gennady Rozhdestvensky is watching a student closely. The young conductor in the loose suit clasps the air, and maestro’s onto him. “What was that gesture with your left hand?” he snaps. “To stop” says the student, apologetically. “Stop what? A draft? What’s the point of stopping those who aren’t playing?” Movement is an anathema to Rozhdestvensky’s conducting. Not show; barely moving can become a show, as he spends a lifetime demonstrating. But a grand arc of the arms, when a turn of the head or a shrug of the shoulders will make the point? A waste.  Upon his death, this June, his friend Gerard McBurney tells the BBC about the habits of Rozhdestvensky’s craft. “He had an extraordinary gift for conducting the way musicians want conductors to work – without words. He never talked about the music. He just did everything through his eyes, his eyebrows, his smile, and his hands and his baton.” And if the movement tells all, why spend the afternoon labouring the point? “He didn’t rehearse much and they were all really delighted because they’d knock off early and go home,” says long-time Rozhdestvensky-watcher David Nice, of the conductor’s BBC Symphony Orchestra years. “They loved him for that. What he brought to the actual performance though was something completely different and inspirational, which hadn’t ever happened in the rehearsal.” His musical appetite is voracious. Have you ever heard a Russian orchestra play a Vaughan Williams symphony? Rozhdestvensky recorded them all. A shark must keep moving through the water in order to breathe, but no more than that.

2

Gennady Rozhdestvensky is old before his time. He is barely twenty years of age, but his hair is thinning, almost gone. He leads the Bolshoi in a performance of The Nutcracker and from this moment on, he will be a conductor of ballet. Where others will scorn it as menial stickwork, he will take the great scores of the ballet repertoire to his heart; he will blow the dust from their covers and dance them with his hands. In the dying days of the Soviet Union, the youthful ballets of his friend Shostakovich come down from the shelf and move once more: The Golden Age; The Bolt; The Limpid Stream. Bright jewels from days of possibility, before the scales fell and terror enveloped all. Rozhdestvensky bears witness to most of the Soviet era, but not its beginning. His father was there, with the Red Army, putting down the sailors’ revolt at Kronstadt, near Petrograd, in 1921. His father, Nikolai Anosov, a conductor. Mikhail Tukhachevsky led the forces of the Bolsheviks that day, leaving 10,000 rebel bodies strewn across the wreckage and the winter ice. Tukhachevksy, the patron of Shostakovich during his ballet days. Tukhachevsky, the name no one dared speak after he was swallowed by Stalin’s purge. Time passes and the fear recedes, but never completely. The young man learns the choreography of professional and political survival, but from a comfortable distance, they’ll ask, as though it were really that simple: “but he wasn’t for the communists, surely?”

3

He crouches, in conference, with his greatest compatriots. The Royal Festival Hall, London, 1960. Mstislav Rostropovich with his cello and Shostakovich talking around what he really means. “Good! Very good! But could it be a little quieter?” Two years later, Rozhdestvensky will bring to the West an earthquake, on paper, in the form of Shostakovich’s long-dormant Fourth Symphony, put away in more difficult times. And every time he brings a Soviet orchestra as news of Red culture, Rozhdestvensky will enter into battle with the bureaucracy, with the swamp of officialdom that doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, and has its instructions, comrade. Much later, he recalls, for Bruno Monsaingeon’s film The Red Baton, going to an official’s office and being informed that 10% of his orchestra would not be authorised to travel abroad. Which 10%? Well, that’s to be decided later. The list, when it arrives, pulls 9 wind players and 3 strings. “You knew you had to plan replacements!” hisses the official. Rozhdestvensky continues:

“Yes”, I said, “But how can I explain it? There are nine woodwinds and three strings, but you see, these people play different songs. Those with bows play one song, and those with whistles play other songs. Put them all together and you get a symphony. The bows can maybe be replaced because they basically all do the same thing. As for the others, I can’t replace them. How can we wave the flag of Soviet art if songs are missing from the symphony?” His eyes popped out as if he’d discovered America. He’d obviously never heard an orchestra. Six months later, another tour, another 12 musicians banned from traveling. But this time it was nine strings and three woodwinds! I went back to the same functionary. He was flabbergasted. “What’s wrong now? We hardly touched the whistles! Only three. We have to eliminate people, that’s our job!”

4

Gennady Rozhdestvensky is surrounded by books. In a century in which knowledge has burned so easily, he has treasured it, acquiring so many volumes that he needs a second apartment to house them all. He emerges from his reading, and he sparkles. “Imagine an amalgam of Sir Thomas Beecham, Peter Ustinov and Isaiah Berlin,” recalls his agent, Robert Slotover, for the BBC. “An hour with Gennady Nikolaevich is like a year at university”, comments the writer Viktor Borovsky. He is sage, but elusive. “He was a bit teasy and whimsical”, says David Nice of interviewing Rozhdestvensky in the 1990s. “You thought you’d got very little, but when you played it back you’d got quite a lot, because he tended to express himself aphoristically.” But he is vulnerable and ever-so-easily bruised. One afternoon, he sits in his dressing room at the venue of a west-European orchestra with whom he has had an occasional association, and notices that his name is not mentioned in the ensemble’s brief biography. Rage and accusations follow. And this is not the only such outburst. His face so often settles into a knowing smile, but sometimes the play and the lightness will fall away.

5

The old order is gone; the new one is not so very different. Vladimir Putin reaches out to grasp the hand of the beaming maestro, the People’s Artist of the USSR, Hero of Socialist Labour and, in 2017, recipient of the Order of Merit to the Fatherland (1^st Class). Rozhdestvensky’s walking stick leaves the ground as he turns to the cameras, hand-in-hand with his president. A month later, he is in the German town of Gohrisch, leading the Dresden Staatskapelle in a last performance of symphonies by Shostakovich. There are nerves. Mistakes are made, some very large. But something remarkable happens during the 15^th Symphony, Shostakovich’s enigmatic valediction to the form. Where it can seem light and flippant, the Dresedeners and their octogenarian time traveller draw from it solemnity and grim conviction. The chilly air of a tomb inhabits this performance, and it proceeds slowly – very slowly indeed – as though the man on the podium, a man nearing the end of a long life, is looking back to his friend whose own life was not nearly long enough, but who lives still for as long as the notes are ringing. Eventually, the stick goes down, and there’s only quiet.



The top image shows Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting the Dresden Staatskapelle at the 2017 International Shostakovich Days festival in Gohrisch. Image(s) are used under the principle of fair use for the purposes of review and study and will be removed at the request of the copyright holder(s). My thanks for David Nice for his help preparing this piece and to Gerard McBurney and Robert Slotover for giving their permission to quote their tributes to Gennady Rozhdestvesnky.

Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, great Russian conductor, is gone.

Dmitri Shostakovich, Mstislav Rostropovich and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
at London's Royal Festival Hall in 1960

Today feels like the end of an era. It was announced that, after a long illness, the great Russian conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvesnky died this morning. He was born in 1931 and was one of the last remaining and active musicians to have had a substantial career in the Soviet period. He was particularly associated with the music of Shostakovich, whose early opera The Nose he revived in 1974. His association with Shostakovich actually began in the 1950s, and he became a champion of the 4th Symphony when it was finally premiered in 1961 - although Kirill Kondrashin conducted the first performance, Rozhdestvensky brought the piece to the west, in 1962.

He was also a great promoter of contemporary music in the later Soviet period, and worked hard to secure a performance of his friend Alfred Schnittke's radical First Symphony in the 1970s. He had a particular passion for English music and even recorded a complete cycle of Vaughan Williams's symphonies.

With his passing, we lose one of the last links to a remarkable, difficult and fascinating part of music history. He worked until his last months, and everyone who loves Russian music must hold him dear.

Tanks, Catcalls and Correcting a Correction

On August 21st, 1968, star Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was scheduled to play Dvorak's Cello Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall, and the irony was lost on no one. The day before, half a million Warsaw Pact troops had poured into Czechoslovakia, land of Dvorak's birth, to crush a remarkable flowering of liberal socialism which, in Moscow's eyes, could not be allowed continue. For months, under the leadership of Alexandr Dubcek, Prague had been reforming industry and freedom of speech. Soviet tanks rolling into Czech cities, on August 20th, signaled the end of Moscow's patience.

Rostropovich, alive to the symbolism of his performance of the greatest Czech work for the instrument, reportedly played with tears in his eyes. On stage beside him were the Soviet conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov, and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra. The mood in the hall was electric, though as the performance began, the protests which threatened to drown out the music subsided. The concert, which concluded with Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, has gone down in legend as one of the 20th century's most remarkable.

These sort of events always attract a certain degree of myth. Did tears really stream down Slava's face? Did anti-Soviet protesters really drown out the music? A letter to BBC Music Magazine, printed in their new December issue, sought to correct this one. No, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser, the impresarios who arranged the concert, firmly state in relation to the second. They write:

"As we were responsible for negotiating the visit of the cellist Mstislav Rostropotvich and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra to the BBC Proms on 21 August 1968 and subsequently to the Edinburgh Festival, we wish to point out the inaccuracies in Peter Haydn Pike's letter (September)."

They continue:

"In view of the Soviet invasion into Prague, we were all expecting trouble, but there was absolutely no interruption during Rostropovich's emotionally charged performance of the Dvorak Cello Concerto, no 'catcalls' to drown out the Shostakovich symphony, and the concert was broadcast in full."

The concert was broadcast, and the two pieces were released on CD, the Dvorak by BBC Legends and the Shostakovich on a separate disc by ICA Classics. Trouble is - there are interruptions, and there are catcalls. Hecklers threaten to hold up the start of Dvorak's Concerto, though they stop before the first note is heard. Things are different, though, in the Shostakovich. Hecklers yell, though it's not clear what, and the first, quiet bars of the Symphony are lost in a melee of protest and lots of shushing. (The first movement is not to be found on Youtube; Spotify users can find the recording there).

I'm not taking aim at the Hochhausers here, who've mixed with the legends of 20th century classical music and without whom London's concert scene would have been much the poorer. But memory's a funny thing, isn't it?

I took a pic of the page in question. Also, you can enjoy the "gems" from Twitter and Facebook.

The header picture is credited to "YouTube", though I suspect they didn't take it. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Rostropovich: The Genius of the Cello

When Mstislav Rostropovich died in 2007, one of the last great connections to a generation of remarkable composers was lost.  Rostropovich was celebrated internationally as the greatest cellist of his age, but he was also the man who coaxed the finest cello music of the Twentieth Century from its towering composers.  Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten, Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Dutilleux - these are just a few, though it was the first three with whom Rostropovich's name become inextricably linked.  John Bridcut's excellent documentary, broadcast last Friday on BBC4, touched on these special relationships and culminated in the first glimpse of newly discovered footage of the premiere, in Moscow, of Britten's Cello Symphony. 

Here was a man of enormous energy, who inspired love and a certain degree of fear in his students and colleagues.  Unlike many of his Soviet contemporaries, Rostropovich was sometimes outspoken in his criticisms of the authorities and their actions and it ultimately forced his exile from his homeland for almost two decades.  Bridcut's documentary ties Rostropovich's story together with this story of political conscience, beginning with the story of his famous 1968 Proms appearance, playing Dvorak on the day Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, and ending with his dramatic intervention in the fall of the Soviet Union, two decades later.  Hopefully, a DVD will follow this broadcast, with all of the footage from the Britten premiere.

Rostropovich on BBC4 tomorrow

Viewers in the UK will get to see John Bridcut's documentary on the late cellist, Mistislav Rostropovich.  It's on BBC4 at 7.30PM on Friday and I for one hope it's on iplayer there after as I'll be out at the time.

Gidon Kremer takes on Putin

Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer has spoken out about the imprisonment of Russian former billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his associate Platon Lebedev.  CNN caries a statement by Kremer explaining his desire to fulfil his duty as an artist to speak out about political wrongdoings.  Kremer states:

"As artists, it's our duty to raise our voices in a chorus of opposition to drown out those who seek to humiliate and punish men like Khodorkovsky. Why? Because history has proved men like Khodorkovsky right."

Kremer places his statement alongside other musicians who have spoken out over political situations, such as Yehudi Menuhin (who Kremer says is "often considered the best violinist in the 20th century".  By whom?  Beats me.) and, perhaps more appropriately, Mstislav Rostropovich, who sheltered Aleksander Solzhenitsyn at a time when the Soviet writer faced official censure for his political activities. 

When Ben met Slava

An excellent article by John Bridcut in today's Guardian recalls the close relationship between Mstislav Rostropovich and Benjamin Britten.  Britten wrote a number of pieces for Rostropovich, including the Cello Symphony of 1963, and a chance discovery of film from the work's first performance leads Bridcut into a description of the bond between the two men.  Most excitingly of all, Bridcut mentions his new film on the cellist, entitled Rostropovich: Genius of the Cello, due to be screened at the Aldeburgh Festival on June 21st.  The film will be broadcast on BBC4 as part of a special cello evening, though information conflicts as to when:  The Guardian says this Autumn; Bridcut's website states July.  Either way, I can't wait.